30 | MAY 26 • 2022
OUR COMMUNITY
W
DIV-TV Sports
Director Bernie
Smilovitz is a go-to
source for news about Detroit’s
franchise sports teams and other
professional sports. A winner
of six local Emmys and six Best
Sportscaster Awards, he’s known
for the humor that informs
his reporting and in his trade-
mark “Bernie’s Bloopers” and
“Weekend at Bernie’s” sports
segments.
Smilovitz was born in
Brooklyn and raised in southeast
Washington, D.C. With 36 years
under his belt at WDIV
, Bernie
has become a Metro Detroit
celebrity. Not many viewers are
aware of his backstory, how-
ever, as a 2G — the child of
Holocaust survivors.
CHAIM (Children of
Holocaust Survivors Association
in Michigan) is a caring com-
munity for the second genera-
tion, “concerned with Holocaust
education and remembrance,
and combating prejudice and
bigoty in all of its forms,
” said
CHAIM founder Dr. Charles
Silow, the group’s co-president
with Sandra Silver.
When Bernie’s family connec-
tion to the Holocaust came to
her attention, Silver asked him
to share his mother’s and father’s
stories. He agreed, then invited
anchor Devin Scillian, his long-
time friend and colleague, to
interview him at the CHAIM
program.
“
A Conversation with Bernie
Smilovitz” attracted 95 par-
ticipants on May 12 at the
Zekelman Holocaust Center
(HC) in Farmington Hills.
BERNIE’S MOM’S STORY
“For forever, our entire lives, my
mother never wanted to talk to
her sons about her Holocaust
experiences,
” Smilovitz said,
echoing the experience in other
2G households. ‘“You don’t
need to hear’” is what Rita
(Mermelstein) Smilovitz typical-
ly told Bernie and his younger
brother, Harvey.
She and their father, Izidor
“Izzy” Smilovitz, spoke Yiddish
in the family’s one-bedroom
apartment, and the brothers
themselves became fluent. They
were always hoping to overhear
some detail from their tight-
lipped parents about what had
happened to them during World
War II.
Everything changed when
Zach Smilovitz, a son of Bernie
and his clinical therapist wife,
Dr. Donna Rockwell (Jake is
their other son), joined his high
school’s film club. Just 16 at the
time, Zach decided his class
project at Detroit Country Day
School in Beverly Hills would be
making a documentary about
Rita and Izzy. To Bernie’s amaze-
ment, his parents were now
eager to speak. They “opened
the vault and told him every-
thing,
” Bernie said.
Zach’s mature and heart-
felt documentary, A is for
Auschwitz: A Weekend with My
Grandparents, is available for
viewing at the HC, on YouTube
and in many schools around the
country.
Bernie’s mother, Rita, was
born in 1925 in Czechoslovakia.
She came from a large farm fam-
ily of 11, also supported by her
father’s general store. Rita was
15 when her mother died from
typhus. At close to 18, Rita and
other family members were put
on what she called in the film:
“an animal train to Auschwitz.
”
Young and healthy, Rita worked
the next two years in the killing
center’s crematorium, or as she
described it: “the place where
they put bodies in the chimney.
”
In the documentary, Rita
shares many of the horrific
moments she experienced,
where “every morning, we were
sleeping on dead people.
” She
knew the Nazi German officer
and physician Josef Mengele,
notorious for performing exper-
iments on Auschwitz prisoners.
One time while opening packag-
es from a cargo train, she heard
a baby’s cry. A guard holding a
rifle to her head then made Rita
throw the baby into the fiery
oven.
“She had to live with that,
”
Bernie said. Now he understood
why “there were nights you
heard her crying.
”
BERNIE’S DAD’S STORY
Bernie’s father, Izzy, was born in
1915 in Hungary. Izzy’s father
wanted him to be a rabbi. Izzy’s
mother died a year after his bar
mitzvah. When the Nazis invad-
WDIV sportscaster Bernie Smilovitz shares the
story of his parents who survived the Holocaust.
Bernie’s Mom & Dad
ESTHER ALLWEISS INGBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
ESTHER ALLWEISS INGBER
Devin Scillian,
WDIV anchor
Bernie Smilovitz,
WDIV-TV sports director
CHAIM co-presidents
Dr. Charles Silow
and Sandra Silver
WDIV colleagues and friends
Devin Scillian and Bernie
Smilovitz before the program